How to Clear the Text of MaskedEdit Control w/o Clearing Mask

This article was previously published under Q117263

Traditionally, to clear the text of a MaskedEdit control, you would set the control's Mask Property to an empty string, and then set its text property to an empty string:

   MaskedEdit1.Mask = ""
   MaskedEdit1.Text  = ""
		

Here's a better method. Modify the Mask property according to the following steps. Then assign the Mask property to the text property of the MaskedEdit control:

1. Replace Every occurrence of the pound sign (#) or question mark (?) in the Mask string with an underscore (_). The underscore is the default value for PromptChar.
2. Retain the literal characters and any spaces in the Mask string in their original positions.

For Example, if the Mask property has this value:

and the PromptChar value is an underscore (_), use the following piece of code to clear all the text and set the focus back to the MaskedEdit control:

   MaskedEdit1.Text = "(___) ___-____ Ext(_____)"
   MaskedEdit1.SetFocus